Biography

I am a PhD Candidate in Psychology and Public Scholar at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

My main research interest is decision-making strategies and cognitive control changes across the lifespan . I’m currently involved in projects examining the neural mechanism supporting the shift towards model-free decision-making in older adults and changes in metacontrol across the lifespan.I am also investigating how different cognitive abilities relate to decision-making and how individuals of different ages learn following surprising events.

I am the Founder of Concordia’s Journal of Accessible Psychology and Journals Coordinator for Concordia’s Journal of Psychology and Neuroscience and Concordia’s Journal of Accessible Psychology

Download my CV .

Interests
  • Decision-making Strategies
  • Cognitive Control/ Meta-control
  • Lifespan Cognitive Development
  • Science Communication
Education

  • PhD in Experimental Psychology, 2018-present

    Concordia University

  • Masters in Experimental Psychology, 2016-2018

    Concordia University

  • BA in Psychology, 2012-2016

    McGill University

Skills

Programming

R, Python, MATLAB & Javascript

Imaging

Electroencephalography (EEG)

Advanced Analysis Techniques

Computational Modeling & Single Trial EEG Regressions

Main Accomplish­ments

ComSciCon Flagship Workshop 2021 Attendee
ComSciCon Flagship Workshop Aug 2021 – Aug 2021
ComSciCon Flagship Workshop provides graduate students with a one-of-a-kind opportunity to meet early career leaders in Science Communication, learn from and interact with a remarkable group of invited experts, and produce an original work communicating complex technical concepts from science and engineering to a new audience.
Public Scholar 2021-2022
Public Scholar Program Concordia University May 2021 – Apr 2022
Ten PhD candidates representing Concordia’s interdisciplinary diversity and excellence in research. Representing all faculties, the Scholars engage with our wider community to share the significance of their work and its impact on society.
NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship - Doctoral
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Sep 2020 – Aug 2023
The NSERC Postgraduate Scholarships – Doctoral (PGS D) program provides financial support to high-calibre scholars who are engaged in an eligible doctoral program
Virtual Summer School in Pattern Recognition in Neuroimaging
University of Vienna Sep 2020
Summer school on Bayesian Statistics, Calcium Imaging, Causal Inference, Deep Learning, EEG & MEG, fMRI and Machine Learning.

Main Accomplish­ments

ComSciCon Flagship Workshop 2021 Attendee
ComSciCon Flagship Workshop Aug 2021 – Aug 2021
ComSciCon Flagship Workshop provides graduate students with a one-of-a-kind opportunity to meet early career leaders in Science Communication, learn from and interact with a remarkable group of invited experts, and produce an original work communicating complex technical concepts from science and engineering to a new audience.
Public Scholar 2021-2022
Public Scholar Program Concordia University May 2021 – Apr 2022
Ten PhD candidates representing Concordia’s interdisciplinary diversity and excellence in research. Representing all faculties, the Scholars engage with our wider community to share the significance of their work and its impact on society.
NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship - Doctoral
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Sep 2020 – Aug 2023
The NSERC Postgraduate Scholarships – Doctoral (PGS D) program provides financial support to high-calibre scholars who are engaged in an eligible doctoral program
Virtual Summer School in Pattern Recognition in Neuroimaging
University of Vienna Sep 2020
Summer school on Bayesian Statistics, Calcium Imaging, Causal Inference, Deep Learning, EEG & MEG, fMRI and Machine Learning.

Blog Posts

A letter to my past self
Ever wish you could speak to your past self? If so, what would you say? In my latest blog post as a #PublicScholar, I write to my past self, telling her all the things I now know and wished I did then.
Last updated on Aug 12, 2021 8 min read
A letter to my past self
Careers Outside Academia, A Podcast
With careers in academia becoming harder and harder to get, and as opportunities to get stellar positions in industry increase, more PhD graduates are starting their careers in industry, and excelling at it! We interviewed 3 Concordia PhD graduates and asked them about their experience and advice.
Last updated on Sep 18, 2021 1 min read
Careers Outside Academia, A Podcast
Deciding what to decide is no easy task
Deciding what to decide can sometimes be irritating or feel downright impossible. While curious cognitive scientists still don’t fully understand how we make hard decisions, we seem to do so just fine. But how does decision-making work anyways?
Last updated on May 13, 2021 5 min read Decision-Making Strategies
Deciding what to decide is no easy task
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Projects

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All Neural Behavioral
Decision-Making Strategies
In this project, I study how the use of different learning strategies changes across development. I am interested in why children and older adults tend to converge on simpler learning strategies and which neural mechanisms underlie age differences in learning.
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Decision-Making Strategies
Cognitive Abilities and Decision-Making
Some cognitive abilities have been shown to support more complex decision-making strategies such as model-based learning. However, much of what supports these effortful strategies remains poorly understood, specially in children and older adults.
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Cognitive Abilities and Decision-Making
Learning from Surprising Events
Some surprising events are just that, surprising. Others, are both surprising and something we need to learn from in order to do better in the future. I aim to uncover how individuals of different ages learn from surprising events they should learn from.
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Learning from Surprising Events
Metacontrol
When trying to solve a complex goal-directed task such as navigating to a restaurant in a new city, we can apply different types of strategies (or combinations of strategies). We can learn the layout of the new city from a map and then use this knowledge to reach the restaurant, or we can simply put the address in our GPS and let it guide us there.
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Metacontrol

Recent & Upcoming Academic Talks

Decision Making and the Brain A Round-Table Discussion with Nathaniel Daw, Yael Niv, Oriel FeldmanHall & Anne Collins
How does the brain allow us to make decisions? How is the brain similar or different to a computer? What are the big questions in …
Sep 19, 2021 8:30 AM
Project Video
Decision Making and the Brain A Round-Table Discussion with Nathaniel Daw, Yael Niv, Oriel FeldmanHall & Anne Collins
Neural evidence for age-related deficits in the representation of state spaces
Younger adults engage in a combination of model-based and model-free decision-making. In contrast, when under high cognitive demand, …
Jun 17, 2021 8:30 AM
Project Video
Neural evidence for age-related deficits in the representation of state spaces
CRDH Webinar Series Talk
In this panel-style discussion Cassandra Neumann, Sean Devine and Alexa Ruel spoke about their research. Cassandra spoke about her work …
Apr 26, 2020 1:00 PM
Project Slides
CRDH Webinar Series Talk

Accessible Talks

Guest on Podcast Episode on In Plain English Science Made Simple
In the fifth episode of In Plain English, expert Ralph White III and guests Maura Lydon and Alexa Ruel explore the unexpected ways in …
Dec 7, 2021
Project Video
Guest on Podcast Episode on In Plain English Science Made Simple
Podcast Episode on In the Spotlight
The mind works in mysterious ways. Why do we make the decisions we do, and how do our experiences guide them? PhD student Alexa Ruel …
Sep 30, 2021
Project Video
Podcast Episode on In the Spotlight
Talk at McGill Center for Lifelong Learning
Decision-making abilities change substantially across the human lifespan. However,the underlying psychological mechanisms are poorly …
Sep 17, 2021
Project
Talk at McGill Center for Lifelong Learning
Is feeling greatful always great?
Does gratitude always have a positive impact in our lives? Listen in as Tanya Singh, Dr. Jing Iris Hu, and Alexa Ruel talk about the …
Sep 2, 2021
Project Video
Is feeling greatful always great?
Podcast Episode on In Plain English Science Made Simple
Join our expert Alexa Ruel and our guests Kelly-Anne Moffa and Mo Carr to discuss the paper “”. During our discussion, we …
Aug 5, 2021
Project Video
Podcast Episode on In Plain English Science Made Simple
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Select Publications

May 2021
Neural evidence for age-related deficits in the representation of state spaces
Neural evidence for age-related deficits in the representation of state spaces

In this study, we demonstrate that the shift to simpler decision strategies in older adults is due to a) impairments in the representation of the transition structure of the task and b) diminished signaling of the reward value associated with decision options.
PDF
February 2021
Resource‐rational approach to meta‐control problems across the lifespan
Resource‐rational approach to meta‐control problems across the lifespan

Over the last decade, research on cognitive control and decision‐making has revealed that individuals weigh the costs and benefits of engaging in or refraining from control and that whether and how they engage in these cost–benefit analyses may change across development and during healthy aging. In the present article, we examine how lifespan age differences in cognitive abilities affect the meta‐control of behavioral strategies across the lifespan and how motivation affects these trade‐offs. Based on accumulated evidence, we highlight two hypotheses that may explain the existing results better than current models. In contrast to previous theoretical accounts, we assume that age differences in the engagement in cost–benefit trade‐offs reflect a resource‐rational adaptation to internal and external constraints that arise across the lifespan.
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